How Mobile Millennials Are Transforming The Music Ticketing Industry

Just over two months ago, Beyoncé closed out her Formation World Tour, which grossed over $256 million from nearly 50 sold-out shows and ranked as the No. 1 tour in North America this year. Tickets were in particularly high demand, as the last time Beyoncé went on tour was in 2014 alongside celebrity husband Jay Z; within 24 hours of the on-sale date, secondary ticket prices were already averaging more than $400 apiece.

One could assume that Beyoncé’s fans would plan their months around these concerts, securing tickets and making travel and/or accommodation plans far in advance. Yet, data from mobile secondary ticket marketplace Gametime suggests that even diehard music fans are buying more of their tickets within a week or even a day of the event—not just for Beyoncé-level stadium shows, but for all concerts across the board.

Gametime is on track to sell over 1 million concert tickets by the end of 2016. While this figure pales in comparison to Ticketmaster's monthly ticket processing rate of 75 million, it still provides a baseline for studying modern ticket purchasing habits, especially considering that millennials comprise around 75% of Gametime’s user base.

Initially specializing in sports games, the mobile marketplace added music to its offerings almost exactly one year ago, in December 2015. At the time, they featured only five music markets with an average of 10 concerts each. Colin Evans, Chief Revenue Officer at Gametime, told me that music fans tended to be less spontaneous than sports fans in buying event tickets, and hence the company would take targeted steps to account for an extended purchasing timeline.

Since then, not only has Gametime’s music vertical expanded into a total of 60 markets, but their assumptions about purchasing habits for concert tickets have also been largely debunked. Fifty-five percent of Gametime music fans buy their tickets the week before a concert, while 30% of them buy tickets the day of the event. The number of music transactions on the app overall more than double on the day of a given concert—partly due to cheaper price tags, which depreciate by over 25% from 30 days out. This makes Gametime's music fans even more spontaneous than the app's NFL fans, and not far behind MLB, NBA and NHL fans.

Percentage of sales that occur on the day of an event for MLB, NBA, NHL, NFL and music fans. (Chart courtesy of Gametime)

“The velocity of interest in concert tickets is skyrocketing,” says Sean Pate, Head of Communications at Gametime. “You’re most likely going to know ahead of time if your favorite artist is coming to town, but we see more people buying at the last minute, either in an impulsive way or a more experienced and savvy way, waiting until closer to the event to purchase tickets at the optimal price.”

While Gametime certainly does not represent the entire ticketing market, its recognition of a last-minute purchasing paradigm may have significant implications for venues and promoters, for whom advertising has always been a consistent pain point. In Eventbrite's recent report The Future of Concert Technology, venues and promoters rated advertising tech as the least effective of all available marketing tools. This is in part due to limited time and money: 60% of respondents spend fewer than four hours marketing each individual show, while 40% are limited to marketing budgets of under $200 per show. As for retaining user attention, Ticketmaster has previously shown that each additional step in the ticket checkout process can cause a 10% decrease in transactions.

Some recent suggestions for improving concert advertising tech have included open platforms and identity-based marketing. This year, Ticketmaster has already integrated with Facebook and Spotify, in addition to releasing its first public-facing APIs and SDKs that allow third-party developers to incorporate their concert discovery, purchasing and management services into their own apps. According to the Eventbrite report, 98% of surveyed venues say enabling ticket sales on other platforms will drive growth in coming years, while 56% of respondents think using listening behavior to drive targeted ticket sales will be extremely impactful to their business.

If Gametime's data is any indication, the trend of immediacy is also an increasingly important consideration. For instance, listening behavior may not be the most significant predictor of buying concert tickets if the event is still several weeks or months out.

Moreover, if we think of the concert industry as a travel industry, not only are millennials embracing more impulsive and immediate travel habits, but mobile is also proving to be an effective conversion channel. Time spent per session on mobile travel sites is down 7%, while mobile web conversion rates for travel sites have increased by 88%, according to Google Analytics.

On the opposite end of the spectrum from Gametime, virtual reality may also become an enticing new income stream for artists, venues and promoters, enabling a sort of "first-day-after" rather than "last-minute-before" experience. Artists such as deadmau5 and Childish Gambino, startups like TheWaveVR and VRTIFY and corporations from Citigroup to Absolut have already capitalized on this technology.

In the future, startups like Gametime will have to collaborate more closely with event professionals to help them make better sense of the widening timeline by which fans will cash in on live music. “While we’re still predominantly a secondary marketplace, we’re starting to share data with venues and promoters because they're interested in how they can get rid of dormant inventory to a captive, growing audience that’s buying at the last minute,” said Pate.

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I'm an award-winning music writer and researcher, passionate about propelling innovation in the music industry using a combination of in-depth business acumen and data-driven storytelling. I take particular interest in how emerging music markets, technologies, leaders and t...